OP: AMP Ch. 223

The rooftop was quiet except for the wind whistling between the tiles. Robin stood across from Scarlet. She wore a serious expression as she sized up the massive gorilla. Sanji had warned her before the fight, this thing's body was tough as hell. Even his strongest kick had only managed to injure it. It couldn't even break a bone.

With that kind of durability, unless you were packing bladed weapons, going toe-to-toe in a straight brawl was asking for trouble.

Robin had been careful, really. But the gorilla's burst speed was insane. And the fact that it could hide its presence even in the middle of that chaotic battlefield? That took skill. Hell, it had even known to cover her mouth the instant it grabbed her to prevent her from calling for help.

After the initial shock wore off, her mind cleared. With the diamond armor boosting her defense, the chances of getting crushed to death were basically zero. All she needed to do was stay calm and find an opening.

The moment they'd broken away from the main battle, the massive hand gripping her had loosened slightly, just a fraction. She'd immediately seized that opportunity and broken free.

Having the Flower-Flower Fruit made her physical training way more efficient than everyone else's. Each limb she sprouted could train independently, multiplying her workout sessions. That was the key reason she'd felt confident enough to follow the guys on the crew down the path of physical conditioning rather than relying purely on her Devil Fruit tricks.

Robin slipping free caught Scarlet by surprise, but the gorilla didn't seem particularly worried. Just a few days ago, it had ambushed and captured her without much trouble. And moments ago, it had succeeded again.

Two successful captures had given it a pretty clear picture of Robin's strength, or so it thought. In the gorilla's mind, this woman had no real way to resist its power.

Seeing the dismissive look spreading across Scarlet's face, Robin said nothing. She quietly raised both hands and crossed them in front of her chest.

"So I really am being underestimated here." Robin shook her head with a slight smile. "In terms of raw strength, my current state isn't your match. I'll admit that. But I'm not very fond of this form... Still, without fully mastering Haki yet, it's my strongest method right now."

The Flower-Flower Fruit's evolution hadn't given her any direct stat boosts. Her strength hadn't increased, and her speed hadn't jumped. What had improved was her control and precision over the ability. Everything just felt smoother, cleaner, and the stamina drain was significantly reduced.

But after eating the third Devil Fruit, the Flower-Flower Fruit could combine sprouted limbs to create gigantification, basically the Gigantesco Mano. She had already been developing related moves, like her Cien Fleur: Wing, which merged multiple limbs together into larger, more powerful constructs.

But now, she could operate in reverse. She could shrink.

Tiny petals began blooming on her shoulders. Miniature hands, no more than three centimeters long, appeared there.

They silently combined, forming larger arms.

Scarlet watched the whole thing with curiosity. As a gorilla whose intelligence was no different from a human's, it had naturally studied the intel on every Straw Hat crew member, especially this woman who could make its instincts scream danger with just a glance. It had reviewed her data multiple times. It had seen footage of her abilities, and understood how they worked.

But this situation puzzled it. Creating tiny arms only to assemble them into normal-sized ones? What was she trying to accomplish? Wasn't that just extra steps for no reason?

But very quickly, Scarlet realized it wasn't redundant at all.

Countless tiny arms fused together, gradually forming the outline of two hands, but those arms were far from the limit. Petals continued swirling everywhere, multiplying at an alarming rate. In just three seconds, an outer shell wrapped around Robin's entire body. It looked like an exoskeleton formed entirely from her Devil Fruit ability.

Scarlet's eyes widened.

From a 1.88-meter-tall woman, Robin transformed directly into a three-meter-tall powerhouse. Her towering figure now allowed her to look Scarlet straight in the eye, matching the gorilla's height exactly.

"Hah... barely got the first stage under control."

The three-meter-tall Robin exhaled a breath of white mist.

The outer shell created by her ability had no clothing covering it, but it also lacked any distinctly female features. It was just a flesh-colored surface. If you looked closely enough, you'd discover that there were countless tiny hands packed densely together, enough to trigger anyone's trypophobia.

She stepped forward. The sheer power in her legs caused the roof tiles to shatter inch by inch beneath her feet. Her speed was insane, faster than using Soru, yet she hadn't even activated it.

Just a single stride produced that much force.

Smack.

An arm struck Scarlet's body. The moment it landed, the sensation was bizarre. The arm sank into the fur, and the gorilla's tightly packed beastly muscles felt soft before that palm, like she'd just slapped a stuffed animal instead of solid meat and bone.

CRACK.

A crisp sound of bone breaking echoed across the rooftop.

Scarlet didn't even have time to react, its left arm snapped cleanly in half. The incomprehensible reality and sheer confusion caused it to momentarily forget the intense pain radiating from its shattered limb. It stared in disbelief as a second palm pierced straight through its chest.

She's... this strong?

"Hah..."

Sweat dripped from the forehead of the three-meter-tall Robin. Maintaining this state consumed an enormous amount of stamina. She could feel her energy draining with every second that passed.

"Looks like I really do need to train my stamina properly," she muttered to herself. Yet as she spoke, a smile curved her lips.

To Scarlet, the world had suddenly become dreamlike and utterly incomprehensible.

Bright dripped along the arm and splashed onto the roof tiles below, staining them crimson. Confusion and bewilderment still lingered on Scarlet's face. Its bones were hard as metal. Yet this woman had just pierced clean through its chest with a single palm strike.

Was that even supposed to be a blunt attack? That penetration was sharper than most swords.

All the countless questions vanished into nothingness the moment Robin withdrew her hand from its chest.

Crash...

Scarlet's body slammed down onto the rooftop tiles.

Robin exhaled another breath of white mist, her shoulders rising and falling as she caught her breath.

"Hah..."

The three-meter-tall figure quietly disappeared, and countless petals fluttered away on the wind, dissolving into nothing.

This was the extreme compression mode.

She could combine countless arms to form Gigantesco Mano attacks, unleashing explosive power equal to the combined output of all those limbs. The problem was that such attacks could only be sustained for a very short time. Her Cien Fleur: Wing had been the predecessor of this shrinking technique.

Whether the arms were shrunk and combined or combined at normal size, the power unleashed by Gigantesco Mano was theoretically the same. It all came down to density.

Wing could only be maintained for a few seconds, that was the limit of her stamina before the third Devil Fruit. Shrinking limbs consumed even more stamina than forming a standard Gigantesco Mano because of the increased processing power required.

By her own calculations, even if her stamina could somehow keep up, she normally wouldn't use, or even bother developing, such an extremely draining technique under normal circumstances. It consumed both physical stamina and mental focus. And if it wasn't overwhelmingly powerful, what was the point? With the same stamina and control requirements, forming a regular Gigantesco Mano was far more practical. Both were essentially brute force attacks, but a massive thirty-meter body also brought overwhelming psychological pressure.

However, the three Devil Fruits had reduced both the stamina consumption and control difficulty significantly, making this compressed mode viable.

More importantly, she could only coat one hand with Haki, and this compression mode allowed her to do exactly that. Every ounce of Haki she could muster was concentrated into a single devastating strike.

Her ability to pierce Scarlet's chest with a single palm wasn't just an increase in raw power, it was the result of combining compressed force with Haki penetration.

If she hadn't used the compression mode and had instead scaled up her combinations proportionally, she could've manifested a giant nearly thirty meters tall. Impressive to look at, sure. But functionally? This was better.

"Really... such an unfriendly technique," Robin muttered, hugging her knees.

The 28-year-old archaeologist squatted on the rooftop, face flushed with embarrassment. Even though she'd been wearing clothes during the fight, the sheer mortification of that form made her cheeks burn red.

Thank god Scarlet had dragged her to this deserted rooftop. If she'd been forced to reveal that form in front of the others, she would've rather died on the spot.

It was just too damn embarrassing. The exoskeleton, the complete lack of features, and the weird uncanny valley appearance of looking human but clearly not.

She shuddered at the thought of Sanji seeing her like that. Or worse, Zoro making some sarcastic comment. Or Luffy asking innocent but devastating questions.

"Never again," she whispered to herself. "Only in emergencies. And preferably when nobody's watching."

She stood up, brushing tile dust off her clothes.